The truth is, however, that the book has very little to do with Aberfan and, instead, uses it as a dramatic backdrop for William to rethink his life and reminisce about his adolescence. And to add another coincidence I spent four years at Cambridge – as a mathematician not a chorister (!

A Terrible Kindness book review: character-driven drama, post A Terrible Kindness book review: character-driven drama, post

A Terrible Kindness is her debut novel, which was shortlisted for the Bridport Peggy Chapman-Andrews award. Trouble is many of the older posts also have weird formatting as a result of the changeover to WP 2 yrs ago.

Things go well and it looks like a life in music will be paved out for William, until something happens . But the festivities are brought to an abrupt end by an urgent appeal for volunteers to immediately travel to Wales and tend to the victims of a horrific incident. I think anyone above a certain ages in the UK will be familiar with Aberfan, as it was a disaster that was and still remains seared on the national conscience due to both the huge loss of life – including 116 young children and 28 adults – and the aftermath – in particular the refusal of the National Coal Board to accept their clear corporate culpability. Rescuers had to pull out the destroyed blackened bodies of children, many of whom had to be identified by scraps of clothing or a hairband. I did as I was told, making full use of my favourite organ stops: trumpet, swell, tremolo, mute, oboe.

A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe review — the pain

Jo Browning Wroe’s debut novel, A Terrible Kindness, purports to be the story of a young embalmer who attends the disaster. Kindness, honesty and integrity are traits which run through William from a young age, and these characteristics attract similar souls. Our garden was visible to the mourners, so every 20 minutes, when the glossy black cars rolled past, we had to become invisible.The novel affords limited emotional access to him, often relating the bare facts of events without letting the reader in on their impact. With much of the story focused on William's time as a chorister at Cambridge, his relationship with his mother, Martin and Gloria, I don't see why this is marketed as "The Aberfan book" other than to just sell more copies. It wasn’t until I started infant school, three miles away, quite unprepared and astounded at the vast number of children in one place, that I began to learn how to mix with others. William’s life is for ever changed after his involvement in the aftermath of Aberfan and he decides at this tender age that he never wants to be a father. But there was never any question that he would be cremated, the means of disposal he had championed as the modern, clean, civilised option .

A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe review: a moving

Approaching Aberfan the day after the disaster, 19-year-old William Lavery, a newly qualified embalmer, felt exhilarated, excited even, that he was about to do a good thing. An impactful and honest read, A Terrible Kindness is an excellent debut and should be recommended to anyone interested in dramatic fiction or character-focused growth. One very minor point: you did a typo in that the soaring solo in the Allegri Miserere is a boy soprano, not a tenor. He is sitting at a linen-covered table with his first love, Gloria, and is about to be congratulated in public by the Institute’s President. My father was the superintendent of a Birmingham city council crematorium, and the job came with a small house set within the grounds.

We go from Charles, who arrives at school in a Rolls-Royce and bullies the poorer kids, to Gloria, whose entire personality is “sweetheart”, and whose dreadful treatment by William can only shake, never break, her love. A 40-foot wall of debris hit Pantglas Junior School, burying its children and teachers, and killing 140. Jo Browning Wroe discusses the Aberfan setting in her notes at the end of the book, and she has taken the events and the aftermath very seriously. The more I think about it, the more I struggle to see any reason why Aberfan needed to be part of this story.

A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe — Scars Of Tragedy A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe — Scars Of Tragedy

I’m thrilled to have added to this enormous, magical ticket offering and hope you find the trip worthwhile.This work by Karen Heenan-Davies, and/or BookTalk and Booker Talk blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4. Money was taken from the appeal fund set up to help the community to pay for work to stabilise the coal tip. Jo Browning Wroe addresses a number of subjects in A Terrible Kindness, such as death, friendship, the normalisation of homosexuality, personal choices, selfishness and selflessness. From our kitchen window we could see the wrought iron gates through which the funeral processions came every 20 minutes and rolled past our window.